"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 017 - Thousand-Headed Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

bullet had knocked dirt into his eyes. It had been fired from some distance.

"Sen Gat!" the man groaned.

There was no one else near. Gloom, the wet swirl of fog, enwrapped the vicinity.

"Sen Gat!" the man repeated, snarling this time.

The man was thin of body, long of arms and legs. He made a grotesque shape lying on the ground, a
black raincoat flung over himself. He had hoped the dark raincoat, coupled with the darkness, would
conceal him. It had failed.

Getting the bullet driven dirt out of his eyes, he scuttled to one side, dragging the raincoat, then got to his
feet and ran.

"Damn Sen Gat!" he gritted.

He came close to a border light and it shone on a jaw that was pointed, a nose hooked and somehow
remindful of a parrot beak. His skin looked like muslin which had been much in the weather, and there
was almost no flesh between the skin and the bones it covered. One of his bony hands was darkly purple
in hue. He veered away from the light, and when a hangar loomed ahead he hesitated, then ran to it and
crept inside. Thrusting his head out again, he listened for a long time for signs of pursuit, but none came to
his ears. Next, he tried to catch some sound of a plane overhead. There was none.

Nervously, he prowled the hangar. In the rear, he found a pair of greasy coveralls draped over a
workbench. Fingering these, he began to chuckle. The coveralls fitted fairly well when he tried them on,
and he did not remove them.

The man pulled up his sleeve. Held tightly to his upper arm by rubber bands was a small packet. The
packet was half an inch thick, possibly four inches long, and wrapped in oiled paper. The rubbers, cutting
off circulation, had made his hand purple.

He stripped the bands off and kneaded his arm slowly to restore blood flow.

"Deuced nasty feeling," he muttered. As an afterthought, he added, "Blast Sen Gat!"

He ended up by putting the slender packet in a coverall pocket, instead of fastening it back to his arm
with the rubbers.

Then he left the hangar and mingled with the crowd, passing unnoticed among a score or so of mechanics
garbed like himself. Anyway, all eyes were watching the southern sky expectantly.

THE BONY man drifted about and finally stopped beside a journalist.

"I say, why all the bloomin' watchful waitin'?" he queried.

The scribe looked shocked. "Jove! Don't you read the sheets?"

"The newspapers? Naw."
The scribbler eyed the other as if observing a freak. The reporter failed to realize that he was being